A small web application that watches the Ask Ubuntu general room for messages that meet a certain criteria and allows them to be tweeted at regular intervals. Some of the features include:
- Customize criteria for discovering "relevant" messages
- Hand-select messages for tweeting
- Allow multiple users to manage tweets
- Send custom messages from the Twitter account
- Queue messages for tweeting at regular intervals
Due to its lengthy name, the app has been nicknamed "tbot".
You can see the application in action here: https://tbot.quickmediasolutions.com
Home page displaying a single tweet
tbot is written in the Go programming language. It will run on any platform supported by Go and compiles to a single binary. Assuming you have Go installed and configured ($GOPATH is set), you can run:
go get github.com/AskUbuntu/tbot
...and the resulting binary will be in $GOPATH/bin.
Configuration is split into two categories:
- Information needed to start the application (address, etc.)
- Settings that control application behavior (search terms, etc.)
The information needed to start the application is provided in a JSON file as a single argument. An example configuration is provided in config.json.default. Copy this file to config.json and customize it as necessary. Then launch the application with:
$(GOPATH)/bin/tbot config.json
Assuming the default configuration, point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and you're good to go!
To run tbot in Docker, pull the askubuntu/tbot image:
docker pull askubuntu/tbot
Then run the container with:
docker \
run \
-d \
-p 8000:8000 \
--env ADMIN_PASSWORD="" \
--env SECRET_KEY="" \
--env TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="" \
--env TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="" \
--env TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="" \
--env TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET="" \
-v /data/tbot:/path/for/data \
askubuntu/tbot
Two important things to note:
- Each of the environment variables listed in the command above must have a valid value set.
- To persist settings and data, mount a volume at
/data/tbot.